


like a fish

by honey_wheeler



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-09
Updated: 2012-03-09
Packaged: 2017-11-01 16:37:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 391
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/358991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/honey_wheeler/pseuds/honey_wheeler
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You know how that would sound if you said it aloud, so you don’t. You only whisper it to yourself at night when you do not sleep, when the girls in your dorm clutch their pillows and dream of fancies, of warm-skinned boys with cold fingers and wet tongues.</p>
            </blockquote>





	like a fish

You are like china. When they hold you, you are a saucer and cup, pink-and-gold-edged, rattling in their rough boy hands that have never held anything so fragile before. You clatter as they touch you, your mouth forming words your mind hasn’t approved, and they turn away. They run away, actually, but that’s all right. It’s what you want anyway, really, except you just couldn’t ask.

You discover everything is easier if you just close your eyes. You can float along, placid and pale, the life you want to see flickering behind your closed eyelids like a picture. People there are like putty, bulging and squeezing through your fingers when you grasp at them. He was solid and firm in your grip once, but you know he isn’t now. You know he is cold and dark and rotting in the ground, the same ground that sucks at your feet when you wish it would just let go for once. You envy him a bit. You know how that would sound if you said it aloud, so you don’t. You only whisper it to yourself at night when you do not sleep, when the girls in your dorm clutch their pillows and dream of fancies, of warm-skinned boys with cold fingers and wet tongues. Lucky Cedric, you think defiantly, peevishly. And again. Lucky Cedric.

The path to the owlery is dark but you could walk it in your sleep. You like the owls better than people. The way they stare without blinking, the way they nip at your fingers if you draw too close. The way there is almost no difference between asleep and awake for them. You are not stupid. You know what people would say, if they knew. Denial, giving up, psychobabble on and on, you don’t want to hear it. You don’t care. Fuck them. Louder then, _fuck them_.

The sky stretches above you, stars and undiscovered planets forming the bowl of heaven upended over the earth. Those stars are really just pinpricks, you’re sure. Tiny holes between the here and the there and if only you tried, you could swim through them like a fish, riding the currents of space to a place where years are still and static, worn smooth like a pebble in a stream. A place where you stay 17 forever and so does he.


End file.
